Official Advance Style - Shadow Urtheart

This tutorial will show you how to colour a Pixel Art in the Sonic Advance 3 style. This style is useful when editing Sonic Advance 3 Character Select Pixel Art.


The style of colouring used in Sonic Advance 3 is pretty simple, and only uses 3 tones, a base tone and 2 shading tones. Start with your character's colours removed so you have a blank canvas to work on.

Use your first shading tone (the lightest one) and shade where ever the character's features are underneath or behind another body part (such as behind the ears, or spikes that are partially hidden). Also use this tone to shade any body parts that are far away from the front of the character (such as the back ear, in this case under Sonic's foot).

Use your darkest shading tone to shade areas within the areas already shaded, to give a sense of depth. To do this imagine where the areas would curve or tilt away from view (such as the bottom of the spikes curving away) and shade those areas.

Using this same princple, go back to your first shading tone and do the same with the areas you have yet to shade.

Use your base tone to fill out the rest of the unshaded area.

We're not finished yet. Go back and get your darkest tone, and use it on areas with a lot of your first shading tone to add more depth to larger areas (with sonic this is most obvious in his spikes).

Still using your darkest tone go around some of the construction lines or raised or dipped areas in the character's body (here the best examples are the side of the ear which connects it to the head, and the eyebrow), this technique is especially important in the hands to give definition between fingers when the hand is in a fist.

One other slight feature of the Sonic Advance 3 style is the almost anti-aliasing effect used around the boarders. Using your first shading tone go around the and put a pixel of colour where two black pixels meet diagonally.

The last thing to remember is that this style of Pixel Art has a double pixel width boarder. Practicing this technique is the only way to perfect it, using the existing Sonic Advance 3 art as a reference.